Main navigation

Blog

… all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 19, 1907 (Part 2)

<…> After this devotion, in small ways at first, lies the beginning of sainthood: the simple life of a love that endured; that, without ever boasting of it, approaches everything, unaccompanied, inconspicuous, wordless.

Paul Cezanne. Bather 1887.

The real work, the abundance of tasks, begins, all of it, after this enduring, and whoever has not been able to come this far may well get to see the Virgin Mary in Heaven, and certain saints and minor prophets as well, and King Saul and Charles le Téméraire—:

but as for Hokusai and Leonardo, Li Tai Pe and Villion, Verhaeren, Rodin, Cézanne—of these, not to mention the good Lord, all he will ever learn, even there, is hearsay.

Paul Cezanne. Christ in limbo. 1867.

Ah, we compute the years and divide them here and there and stop and begin and hesitate between the two.

But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature,

Paul Cezanne. In the woods. 1898.

and all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

Some day the time and composure and patience must also be there to let me continue writing the Notebooks of Malte Laurids; I now know much more about him, or rather: the knowledge will be there when it is needed …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK

I read this letter, and see a miracle.

Here and now, in this moment, we are witnessing Rilke becoming what he is, and has always been, and will always be.

The real work begins after enduring…

SEEING PRACTICE: how related one thing is to the next

Rilke writes:

But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next…

Our brains are trained to see separate objects, not how inseparable they are from what surrounds them. But find a moment or two in your day, and pay attention to how things are related, to the spaces in between, to how very much of one piece is everything. Just rest your awareness in the space BETWEEN objects, not on the objects themselves.

This lying-down-with-the-leper and sharing all one’s own warmth with him, including the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must at some time have been part of an artist’s existence, as a self-overcoming on the way to his new bliss.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 19, 1907 (Part 1)

I’m sure you remember … in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the place that deals with Baudelaire and his poem: “Carrion.” I couldn’t help thinking that without this poem, the whole trend toward plainspoken truth which we now seem to recognize in Cézanne could not have started; first it had to be there in all its inexorability.

Paul Cezanne. The card players. 1896.

First, artistic perception had to surpass itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and is valid, along with everything else that is.

Vincent van Gogh. Prisoners’ round. 1890.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything that exists: a single refusal at any time, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Paul Cezanne. Strangled woman. 1872.

Flaubert, in retelling the legend of Saint-Julien-l’hospitalier with so much discretion and care, showed me this simple believability in the midst of the miraculous, because the artist in him participated in the saint’s decisions, and gave them his happy consent and applause.

This lying-down-with-the-leper and sharing all one’s own warmth with him, including the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must at some time have been part of an artist’s existence, as a self-overcoming on the way to his new bliss.

Paul Cezanne. Preparation for the funeral. 1869.

You can imagine how it moves me to read that even in his last years, Cézanne had memorized this very poem—Baudelaire’s Charogne—and recited it word for word. Surely one could find examples among his earlier works where he mightily surpassed himself to achieve the utmost capacity for love.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breat-feeding Paul. 1872.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Limitless objectivity

Rilke writes:

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything that exists: a single refusal at any time, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

But is this only about artists, or about every single one of us?

I think we have reached the point in evolution where neither of us is permitted to turn their back on anything that exists. Otherwise, we are all doomed.

Artists were just in the vanguard (haven’t they always been in the vanguard of humanity’s evolution?)

SEEING PRACTICE: LOOKING AT UGLINESS

Is it as simple, and as difficult, as this: to see the sheer beauty of the world, one must learn not to turn back on its ugliness?

In “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, Rilke writes:

Do you remember Baudelaire’s incredible poem “Une Charogne”? Perhaps I understand it now. Except for the last stanza, he was in the right. What should he have done after that happened to him? It was his task to see, in this terrifying and apparently repulsive object, the Being that underlies all individual beings. There is no choice, no refusal. Do you think it was by chance that Flaubert wrote his “Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”? This, it seems to me, is the test: whether you can bring yourself to lie beside a leper and warm him with the warmth of your own heart—such an action could only have good results. (Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International Edition (1990)).

Charles Baudelaire. The Carcase

The object that we saw, let us recall,
This summer morn when warmth and beauty mingle —
At the path’s turn, a carcase lay asprawl
Upon a bed of shingle.

Legs raised, like some old whore far-gone in passion,
The burning, deadly, poison-sweating mass
Opened its paunch in careless, cynic fashion,
Ballooned with evil gas.

On this putrescence the sun blazed in gold,
Cooking it to a turn with eager care —
So to repay to Nature, hundredfold,
What she had mingled there.

The sky, as on the opening of a flower,
On this superb obscenity smiled bright.
The stench drove at us, with such fearsome power
You thought you’d swoon outright.

Flies trumpeted upon the rotten belly
Whence larvae poured in legions far and wide,
And flowed, like molten and liquescent jelly,
Down living rags of hide.

The mass ran down, or, like a wave elated
Rolled itself on, and crackled as if frying:
You’d think that corpse, by vague breath animated,
Drew life from multiplying.

Through that strange world a rustling rumour ran
Like rushing water or a gust of air,
Or grain that winnowers, with rhythmic fan,
Sweep simmering here and there.

It seemed a dream after the forms grew fainter,
Or like a sketch that slowly seems to dawn
On a forgotten canvas, which the painter
From memory has drawn.

Behind the rocks a restless cur that slunk
Eyed us with fretful greed to recommence
His feast, amidst the bonework, on the chunk
That he had torn from thence.

Yet you’ll resemble this infection too
One day, and stink and sprawl in such a fashion,
Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you,
My angel and my passion!

Yes, you must come to this, O queen of graces,
At length, when the last sacraments are over,
And you go down to moulder in dark places
Beneath the grass and clover.

Then tell the vermin as it takes its pleasance
And feasts with kisses on that face of yours,
I’ve kept intact in form and godlike essence
Our decomposed amours!

It is this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity, that strikes people as so offensive and comical in Cézanne’s portraits.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 18, 1907 (Part 2)

<…> This labor which no longer knew any preferences or biases or fastidious predilections, whose minutest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely responsive conscience, and which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.

Paul Cezanne. Rocks at L’Estaque. C. 1882.

It is this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity, that strikes people as so offensive and comical in Cézanne’s portraits.

They accept, without realizing it, that he represented apples, onions, and oranges purely by means of color (which they still regard as a subordinate means of painterly practice), but as soon as he turns to landscape they start missing the interpretation, the judgment, the superiority, and when it comes to portraits, there is that rumor concerning the artist’s intellectual conception, which has been passed on even to the most bourgeois, so successfully that you can already see the signs of it in Sunday photographs of couples and families.

Paul Cezanne. Little girl with a doll. 1904.

And here Cézanne naturally strikes them as utterly inadequate and not worthy of discussion.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

SEEING PRACTICE: Cézanne’s portraits

What stares us in the face is the fleeting, illusory nature of our feelings and concerns and, ultimately, of our selves and our subjective identities. It is not exactly flattering to the ego to see itself reducible to color content…

The idea of “artist’s intellectual conception” is as good a defense against this realization as any.

It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 18, 1907 (Part 1)

<…> I would not have been able to say how far I had developed in the direction corresponding to the immense progress Cézanne achieved in his paintings.

I was only convinced that there are personal inner reasons that allow me to see certain pictures which, a while ago, I might have passed by with momentary sympathy, but would not have revisited with increased excitement and expectation.

It’s not really painting I’m studying (for despite everything, I remain uncertain about pictures and am slow to learn how to distinguish what’s good from what’s less good, and am always confusing early with late works).

It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. C. 1879.

That’s why I must be careful in trying to write about Cézanne, which of course tempts me greatly now.

It’s a mistake (and I have to acknowledge this once and for all) to think that one who has such private access to pictures is for that reason justified in writing about them; their fairest judge would surely be the one who could quietly confirm them in their existence without experiencing in them anything more or different than facts.

But within my life, this unexpected contact, the way it came and established a place for itself, is full of confirmation and relevance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Storyline: limitless objectivity

The turning point Rilke feels in Cézanne, and in himself, is the point of LIMITLESS OBJECTIVITY (he will write more about it later on).

Here, it emerges in opposition to his own subjective experience of Cézanne, his “private access”.

But is it possible to see a work of art as an objective fact, without any inner “private access” to it?

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY THINGS

In the beginning of this series, I asked you to pay attention to simple things surrounding you in daily life.

OCTOBER 17, 1907 (Part 5)

… and finally: one of those landscapes he was always postponing and yet already painting again and again:

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat field with a Reaper. 1890. Click to zoom in on van Gogh Museum site.

a setting sun, yellow and orange red, surrounded by its glow of yellow, round fragments.

Against it, full of revolt, Blue, Blue, Blue the slope of curved hills, separated from the twilight by a strip of assuaging pulsations (a river?), in which, transparent in dark antique gold, in the slanted front third of the picture, you can make out a field and leaning groups of upright sheafs of corn.

THE WORK

The work we are postponing, waiting for the time when we are finally ready to do it: and yet already doing it.

Rilke writes about van Gogh, but perhaps even more so, about himself.

He is postponing the work on his autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and already writing it, in these letters. Some passages were eventually included in the book verbatim.

He is full of doubts about writing about Rodin, and yet already writing about him, too.

And, strikingly, as we will see soon, he doesn’t just POSTPONE, but resolves NOT to write about Cézanne… because he doesn’t consider himself qualified.

But the work gets done, in its own time and rhythm, quite oblivious to our decisions.

The best we can do is not to get in its way with our doubts and transient concerns.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH’S indescribable reality

Yesterday, I wrote about the moment I got a glimpse of van Gogh’s visual reality in front of his self-portrait.

But even after that moment, it took a long, long time to even begin to integrate his expansion of vision into my experience of life, to finally get “the right eyes”.

It takes essentially the same practice Rilke describes in these letters: the practice of paying your full attention first to paintings, and then, with the eyes trained and cleansed by them, to the world around us.

An elderly man with a short-cropped, black-and-white mustache, sparse hair of the same color, cheeks indented beneath a broad skull:

the whole thing in black-and-white, rose, wet dark blue, and an opaque bluish white——except for the large brown eyes—

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS

“As if woven of fresh reed”: could one even imagine a more precise way to describe not only this particular painting, but ALL of van Gogh’s mature work?

Vincent van Gogh. Wheat field with a Reaper. 1890. Click the image to zoom in.

SEEING PRACTICE: VAN GOGH

I remember the exact moment when I realized that what van Gogh shows us is a precise and truthful depiction of HIS visual reality, his unique experience of fluid, dynamic color. It was in Amsterdam, in front of this self-portrait.